The Nick & Nora Is So 2009
It was the height of sophistication: Curvier than a Martini glass but deeper than a coupe, the Nick & Nora was the glass of the early aughts’ great craft cocktail renaissance. It was elegant and classic, and at the same time, it was new. When, in 1987, Dale DeGroff originally revived the glass for the pre-Prohibition cocktail list at the Rainbow Room—and christened it the “Nick & Nora,” after the murder-solving sophisticates in the 1934 film adaptation of The Thin Man—it was a rebellion against the V-shaped Martini glass that had come to dominate the national cocktail scene.
If the V shape had associations of cheesy Martini bars and saccharine pseudo-Martinis, the Nick & Nora was elegant, delicate, understated. It hopped across Manhattan from the Rainbow Room down to Pegu Club, and then everywhere else, a sign of a new era. Drinking was no longer the provenance of partiers; now it was a thinking man’s pursuit. “I think the Nick & Nora is pretty emblematic of that very serious time,” says Derek Cram, bar director for San Diego’s Puesto. And, not by coincidence, it was ideally suited for very serious drinks.
“We were favoring a lot of stirred, boozy cocktails, because they were just so different from what was being consumed at the time,” says Cram. That Nick & Noras were also practical, hard to spill and hard to break was part of their appeal. Bartenders loved them, and patrons came to expect them, a chic indicator of a well-made drink. William Elliott, bar director and managing partner at Maison Premiere in Brooklyn, New York, in fact recalls “flack from some kinds of cocktail nerds” for not using Nick & Noras. (He prefers a V.)
But then—it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment it happened—the Nick & Nora started a slow fade. “It kind of disappeared, without me actually identifying that it disappeared,” says Brian Evans, head of bars for New York’s Sunday Hospitality Group. It isn’t that they’ve vanished from the earth—Nick & Noras are still everywhere, including at several of Evans’ bars—but that they’ve lost their status. Abe Vucekovich, beverage director at Meadowlark Hospitality in Chicago, is a passionate Nick & Nora partisan, and still, he worries: “I think it’s perceived like old person’s glassware?”
It was a confluence of factors. “I hate to be overly reductive and just pin everything back to the pandemic,” says Evans, but, at the same time, of course it changed what people wanted from their drinks. The resurgence of going out led to the frenzied resurgence of Martinis, sometimes in name only—Espresso Martinis, dirty Martinis, ’tini Martinis, any Martinis—which helped redeem the reputation of the much-maligned V-shaped glass. Suddenly, it seemed to fit the moment. It was, as Eater’s Jaya Saxena put it, “sharp and hard and a little bitchy.” It was what the trend forecaster Sean Monahan called “boom boom.” And it was fun. The Nick & Nora felt like a holdout from another time.
At least, for now. To be out of fashion only means to be positioned for a comeback, and the “dainty” V is reaching its saturation point. When it does, the Nick & Nora will be waiting: simple and elegant, as durable as ever.